You can use IBM App Connect to pass key data between Salesforce and other apps â€“ automatically, in real time.

You can use App Connect with Salesforce by configuration and data mapping without a need for coding, and can achieve a return on your investment in minutes/hours, not days/months.

This guide shows you how…

If you can’t find what you want, or have comments about the “how to” information, please either add comments to the bottom of this page or send us comments by email.

A typical business scenario

Say your company uses Salesforce.com as a way of delivering a superior customer experience. Your marketing, call center, and other business teams use other SaaS applications that depend on their data being up-to-date with the contacts, leads, orders, and other customer data in Salesforce. Imagine you get to work to find youâ€™ve got lots of new leads in your Salesforce account. Great news… but youâ€™re going to have to spend time adding all this new data to the marketing app, mailing lists, and sharing the leads with the rest of your team.

How App Connect can help

When new a lead, contact, or other customer data is added to Salesforce, App Connect automatically passes key data to other applications. So no more time wasted manually transferring your lead data to other applications.

Similarly, you have other applications that generate contacts, leads, orders, and other customer data. You would waste precious time adding the data manually to Salesforce. Again, IBM App Connect can help, automatically updating Salesforce in real time, adding the leads (or other customer data) that other applications generate. IBM App Connect automates the sharing of this valuable data across these different apps.

Business users can integrate and manage data as it moves between the Salesforce platform and existing company systems, in the cloud and on premises. Critical data remains current and accurate, no matter where it is housed, while the solution feeds data to cognitive applications with minimal effort and without disturbing core data flows.

IBM App Connect also gives IT users the tools to build integrations that expose enterprise systems, which are consumable via Salesforce Connect. Developers working with lines of business can use these integrations to build employee-facing Lightning applications.

IBM App Connect extends the reach of the Salesforce platform to rapidly access data in real time within any enterprise system, home grown or off the shelf. Avoid the cost and overhead of synchronizing data by virtualizing access to the data at its source, giving all users an up-to-the minute view of client data.

What should I consider first?

Before you use App Connect Designer with Salesforce, consider the following information.

If you want to create a free Salesforce account to test out App Connect, make sure that you create a Developer account rather than a Trial account. If you connect to App Connect with a Trial account, the Salesforce events do not work.

Your edition of Salesforce needs to be enabled for API access (“API enabled”).

If you’re using a free trial of Salesforce, it won’t be API enabled; sign up to the Developer Edition instead.

By default, API access is only allowed on Enterprise, Developer, Unlimited, and Performance editions. Professional Edition does not come with free API access, and you might need to pay to enable the API access or upgrade to a higher edition.

Ask your Salesforce administrator if your edition of Salesforce is API enabled, and if necessary request API enablement or upgrade to a higher edition that has API access.

To create an integration flow that passes key data between Salesforce and other apps, you must connect App Connect to each app in the flow. You can connect to an app either from the Applications tab on the App Connect Catalog page, or when you add an app to a flow. To connect App Connect to your Salesforce account:

If required, specify the Salesforce environment (production or sandbox), or subdomain (with a personalized login page) that you want to connect to. The type of environment or subdomain you can connect to depends on your Salesforce edition. For example, sandboxes are available in some editions like Professional, Enterprise, Performance, and Unlimited, but arenâ€™t available in the Developer Edition.

If you’re connecting to a standard production environment, you can leave the Custom URL field blank. When you connect, you’ll be automatically directed to the generic, non-instance-specific production URL:

https://login.salesforce.com

Alternatively, you can specify a production instance by entering its login URL in the Custom URL field in the following format (without the https:// prefix):instance.salesforce.com

where instance represents the name of the production instance you’re connecting to; for example, na19, eu11, or ap1 for the North America, EMEA, or Asia Pacific regions.

If you’re connecting to a standard sandbox that’s being used for development or testing, you’ll need to first specify its login URL in the Custom URL field by using either of these values (without the https:// prefix):

where instance represents the name of the sandbox instance you’re connecting to; for example, cs19.

If you’re connecting to your company’s personalized login page (with a configured subdomain) in a production environment, you’ll need to first specify the URL in the Custom URL field using the following format (without the https:// prefix):

subdomain.my.salesforce.com

where subdomain represents the name of a subdomain defined within your Salesforce org to replace the instance name; for example, myCompanyName.

Tip: If you’re using the Developer Edition, the custom URL should end with -dev-ed.my.salesforce.com rather than .my.salesforce.com, which is used in other editions.

If you’re connecting to your company’s personalized login page (with a configured subdomain) in a sandbox environment, you’ll need to first specify the URL in the Custom URL field using the following format (without the https:// prefix):

subdomain--sandboxname.instance.my.salesforce.com

where subdomain represents the name of a subdomain defined within your Salesforce org to replace the instance name, sandboxname is your assigned sandbox name, and instance is the name of the sandbox instance; for example, myCompanyName--mySandboxName.csN (where N is a number).

Specify the user name and password of the Salesforce environment you want to connect to.

Note: If you want to connect to Salesforce sandboxes or subdomains and use Salesforce as a source application to trigger events, the Salesforce “Organization” object must be enabled in your Salesforce environment. You can ask your Salesforce administrator whether the “Organization” object is enabled in your Salesforce edition, and if necessary request that the object be enabled.

When you use Salesforce as a target application, make sure that you identify the required fields for the entry you are creating and assign values to these fields. For example:

If you are creating a new Lead, you must provide values for the LastName and Company fields.

If you are creating a new Contact, you must provide a value for the LastName field.

If you are creating a new Account, you must provide a value for the Name field.

App Connect performs optimized event handling for Salesforce. For Salesforce events, you can use the following subset of standard objects that are supported by Salesforce PushTopic queries: Account, Campaign, Case, Contact, Lead, Opportunity, and Task.

If platform events are defined in your Salesforce org to deliver custom event notifications when something meaningful happens, you can add those platform events to your App Connect flows either as an event that consumes an event notification from Salesforce, or an action that publishes an event notification. To help you easily identify platform events in App Connect, we’ve appended the label (Platform event) to each platform event in the Salesforce list of events and actions.

Example: How to identify a platform event in App Connect

To add a platform event as an App Connect event that triggers a flow, you’ll need to use the Configure more events link to display additional Salesforce objects, and then locate and select the platform event that you want to add to the flow.

Tip: To quickly search for a platform event in the list of events or actions that are discovered, you can type (plat in the search field, as a filter.

You can optionally map to the platform event fields in subsequent nodes in the flow, in order to pull in data from the event notification. When the flow runs, the configured actions will be processed whenever a new event notification (that is, an instance of the platform event) is published in your Salesforce org.

Example: Selecting a platform event as an App Connect event

Example: Mapping to platform event fields from an App Connect action

To add a platform event to a flow as an App Connect action, you’ll need to use the Show More link to display additional Salesforce objects, and then locate and select the platform event for which you want to create (or publish) an event notification. In the resulting “Create” node, you can then complete the custom fields that were configured in the Salesforce platform event definition. When the flow runs, App Connect will publish the event notification, and any Salesforce after insert trigger on that event will fire.

Example: Selecting a platform event as an App Connect action

Example: Custom fields in the platform event definition and in the corresponding App Connect action

You can obtain these IDs from the URL of the relevant Salesforce records. In the following example, you can see that the contract number 00000101 has an Contract ID value of 8000Y000000lfvG. (And you can obtain the Account ID in a similar way from an open account record.)

When specifying dates, use the ISO standard format YYYY-MM-DD. For example, specify 19 September 2017 as 2017-09-19.

Examples

When I add a new lead in Marketo, a lead is updated or created in Salesforce

Learn how easy it is to use App Connect to connect Marketo to Salesforce so that every time a new lead is added in Marketo, a lead record with the same information is automatically updated or created in Salesforce.

When I create a new case in Salesforce, a message classified by Watson Natural Language Classifier is created in Slack

Learn how easy it is to create an event-driven flow in App Connect Designer to classify the text from a Salesforce case. Then, after the text has been classified, automatically create a message in Slack identifying the type of case that has been raised and the case number.

Synchronizing account data from SAP to Salesforce.com using IBM App Connect Professional

Moving bulk data from SAP to Salesforce with IBM App Connect Professional

Learn about techniques to move bulk data (thousands of records) from SAP to Salesforce.com. Using these techniques, you can create or update hundreds of Salesforce objects in one API request, making the most of the Salesforce.com limits for the total API requests per 24-hour period.